


maybe just a cigarette more

by mlmbitch



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Christmas, Eddie centric, Frank Kaspbrak's Actual A+ Parenting, Internalized Homophobia, Light Angst, M/M, Marijuana, Richie and Eddie bicker but what's new, Shotgunning, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, why I always hurt my comfort characters idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27925618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mlmbitch/pseuds/mlmbitch
Summary: Richie pulled out a little plastic baggy with what looked to be a cigarette inside out of his jacket pocket.“Don’t fucking call me that,” Eddie pouted as he closed the window, then turned to where Richie was on the bed. “A cig? Don’t you have like three packs of those from Bev in your sock drawer?”Richie looked at the other boy. “This isn’t just a normal cigarette, Edward, it’s a blunt.”-or, it's christmas and richie is determined to get eddie to smoke weed with him. also they're gay.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 2
Kudos: 41





	maybe just a cigarette more

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to the end result of what happens when you get excited for chirstmas fics but can't write fluff for the life of you so you decide to just write angst instead. this is also only the second fic i've published, so please go at least somewhat easy on me ahbfjsdhb
> 
> cw: if you haven't already read the tags, this work contains marijuana usage by minors and internalized homophobia, as well as just a bit of sonia kaspbrak being sonia kaspbrak, so be warned.
> 
> title from "baby it's cold outside"

It was Christmas time in Derry, Maine. The shops downtown have all been decorated for the season since early November, half the houses in town had cheesy blowup snowmen and light up reindeer in their front yard, and someone even gave the giant Paul Bunean statue that was in the park a santa hat.

At the Kaspbrak household, however, there was none of that. There were no inflatable figures (they use so much energy, they could make us blow a fuse and we’ll freeze to death!), there were no lights (they’re a fire hazard!), there wasn’t even a tree (it could fall and crush you to death, Eddie-bear!). The only thing in the house indicating that it wasn’t currently July was a tiny ceramic nativity scene placed carefully on top of the television set that was in the living room.

Growing up, Sonia Kaspbrak always liked Christmas, or, at least, the religious aspect of it all. She would always take Eddie to the church service, and he would listen to the story about the birth of Jesus and the three wisemen and the shepherd boy following the star with his sheep. The plotline where Mary had gotten pregnant without having sex was always the part his mother would point out to him when the paster was reading it. When he got older he realised that it was probably her way of driving him away from the activity, much like her constant talk of AIDS and STDs, but his younger self just figured it was her favorite part of the story -- which, to be fair, could just as well be true.

Despite his mother trapping him in church for most of Christmas Day every year, Eddie actually had quite fond memories of the holiday, all of which were courtesy of his father. Though he had died when Eddie was young, one of the most memorable times with his father before he passed had been during the holidays. His mother had been out of town to take care of one of his aunts, who was sick, and she had left him and his father alone on Christmas Day and the week after. 

His father didn’t take him to church, but instead chose to take him downtown. He let Eddie pick out a few presents for himself -- a few records for the record player they used to have in the living room and that year's holiday Barbie, which he had asked his mother for the month before, but she refused to get it for him, for reasons a young Eddie didn’t yet know. He then took him to the park to play in the few inches of snow they had received the night before, and treated him to his first (and last) cup of hot chocolate. They returned home and danced to the records he got before his father could send him to bed.

He still had the things, his dad got for him, hidden in the old leather briefcase that his father left to him that he hid under his bed. Unfortunately his mother had sold his father’s record player, along with most of his possessions, when he died, so he couldn’t listen to them ever again, but he still took the albums (as well as the old doll) out to look at approximately four times a year. Once on his birthday, once on his father’s birthday, once on the anniversary of his death, and once on Christmas Eve.

That was what he was doing now. By now he had memorized the songs’ names and order, though not so much the songs themselves, as he had only listened to them a total of once and that was over a decade ago. The most he could remember was the chorus to a Barbra Streisand song that was on one of the albums and the tune to a Christmas song he couldn’t remember the title to, but knew it was on the Elvis record. 

He hummed the mystery tune as he sorted through the albums, trying his best to remember how any of the other songs on the tracks went, though he knew he probably wouldn’t remember -- it didn’t work any of the previous times he did it, but he did it anyways. If only he could look up the songs in a dictionary somewhere, figure out the lyrics somehow, maybe then he’d rememb-

A sudden tapping noise startled Eddie out of his thoughts. He whipped his head towards the window at the other side of his small room, where he saw a certain messy haired boy crouching on the bit of roof outside the window, knocking lightly on the glass.

He stalked over to the window and opened it. “You’re late,” he hissed.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. I had to wait until my parents were done setting up all the presents for tomorrow,” Richie said, inviting himself into the room.

“You mean later today! Jesus Christ, Rich, it’s-” he checked the clock on his nightstand “-almost two in the morning!”

“Yeah, yeah, Eds, don’t get your panties in a twist,” Richie said, making his way to the twin sized bed in the middle of the room. “I had to wait until the folks were in bed, they were up late getting all the presents in line. Besides, I had to go get this.” He pulled out a little plastic baggy with what looked to be a cigarette inside out of his jacket pocket.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Eddie pouted as he closed the window, then turned to where Richie was on the bed. “A cig? Don’t you have like three packs of those from Bev in your sock drawer?”

Richie looked at the other boy. “This isn’t just a normal cigarette, Edward, it’s a blunt.” Eddie’s eyes widened. “I, along with the Losers, notice how you get around this time of year and I figured I might be able to help you relax for once in your fucking life,” Richie continued, putting the blunt in between his fingers, digging out a lighter from his left pocket, and going to light it.

“No!” Eddie all but shouted, running to Richie and taking the lighter from his hand. “You can’t fucking light that in here, do you have any fucking idea what my mother would do if she came in here later and smelled even the slightest hint of weed? She’d have my fucking head, and then go after yours right after!”

“Okay, okay, fuck, quiet down, you’re gonna wake her up,” Richie said, taking his lighter out of Eddie’s hand and putting it and the blunt back in his pocket. He pointed his finger at the other boy “We’re doing this, though, I paid good money for this shit and I’m not about to let it go to waste.”  
Eddie made a face like he was going through all of the stages of grief at once. 

“Fine.”

Richie pumped his fist in victory. “But,” Eddie continued, “we’re not doing it anywhere near here, my mom will smell it. We can go down to the barrens, do it there.”

Richie grinned. “ Okay. I can do that.”

Richie didn’t bring his car, for risk of the engine waking up Eddie’s mother. He usually rode his bike the two and a half blocks to Eddie’s street, where he would usually leave the bike hidden in the bushes of a neighboring yard, but the handlebars to said bike rusted off after weeks of being left in the snow for hours at a time, so he had to walk. Eddie didn’t have a car -- or even know how to drive, for that matter, his mother claiming that the risk was far too high, and his bike was tucked away in the garage for the winter.

So they walked.

It wasn’t too bad of a journey. The barrens were only about a ten minute bike ride away from his house, so that meant around fifteen minutes of walking, which were mostly filled with silence, occasionally broken by comments from Richie about various Christmas decorations.

It was incredibly dark down in the barrens, thick trees blocking any light from the surrounding town. With all the tree roots and loose rocks it was honestly a miracle neither of them-

A sudden shout disrupted the silence. Eddie turned to the source of the sound, only to see Richie falling, reaching to catch himself on the other boy. Eddie, however, being much smaller than his companion, went down with him.

On top of him, to be exact.

Richie let out a grunt as he landed on his back, and another when Eddie had landed on his stomach. “Fucking hell,” Eddie groaned. He looked up to check on his friend, but any words died in his mouth when he saw the boy. Richie’s glasses fell off his face sometime during the fall, and, fuck, it’s just fucking unfair how much those ugly ass glasses cover his pretty ass face and his pretty fucking eyes. Jesus, he really needed to try and convince him to get contacts.

They were so fucking close, Eddie could probably lean down and kiss him if he really wanted to. And he really fucking wanted to.

Richie broke the silence. “Looks like you fell for me, Spaghett,” he joked, sounding just as breathless as Eddie felt.

Yeah, guess I did, he wants to respond.

“Shut the fuck up, Trashmouth,” he says instead, pushing himself off of Richie and standing up, brushing himslef off. He offered his hand to Richie, who took it and pulled himself. “Now, where the fuck did your glasses go?”

Eddie knew he liked boys for a long time now. Specifically since the second day of first grade. He had to redo kindergarten because his mother had kept him out for practically half the year, as his father’s recent passing had made her paranoid about him getting sick, so he was older than all of the other kids there. One of the third graders had overheard a few of the teachers talking about how he had to repeat and called him stupid during recess. He had been crying inside the tube slide when Bill had found him. He had asked him what was wrong, told him that he wasn’t stupid, and asked him if he had wanted to be his friend.

That night Eddie went home and gushed to his mother about the pretty boy who asked him to sit with him and his friends at lunch. His mother then told him about how other boys weren’t supposed to be pretty, that girls were supposed to be pretty -- to which Eddie replied ‘well, I think this boy is pretty!’ 

That night was the first night of many he had heard Leviticus.

He knew he had liked Richie since he was fourteen. It was the fall after George had gone missing, and the Losers were all hanging out hanging out in the club house, some doing homework, but most of them were just fucking around. Eddie was reading the newest X-Men comic he had just gotten in the hammock, when Richie had stalked up to him and got in with him.

“What the fuck are you doing, Trashmouth?” Eddie asked, sitting up slightly more than he was before.

“You’re ten minutes are up, gremlin.” Richie responded placing his feet in his lap and taking the comic he was halfway through reading.

“Hey!” Eddie snagged the issue back from Richie’ thieving hands. “I was reading that dipshit, you made me lose my fucking page. And I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Oh, so the ten minute rule only applies when I’m in the hammock?”

Eddie rolled his eyes and looked up to respond, but his remark never made it past the tip of his tongue, all of the space in his brain suddenly being taken up by thoughts of RichieRichieRichie. How the sunlight just hit Richie’s face just then in that moment made him look like one of the leads in his mother’s soaps, or how his freckles were especially prominent that day, or how that look he had on his face whenever he was teasing Eddie was quite possibly the cutest shit he’s ever seen.

“Eddie?” Richie asked, startling him out of his thoughts. “You okay there, bud?”

“Uh- yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine. Fuck you, Rich.”

As Richie’s laughter echoed out in the clubhouse, two facts had come upon him. One, that he had somehow fallen for Richie Tozier, and two, that he was undoubtedly utterly fucked. 

They eventually found his glasses and started walking again, this time with Richie’s lighter open and lit, not supplying much light, just enough to keep them from tripping again. They walked in silence once more through the wood, listening to the wind rustling the remaining leaves on the trees and the occasional owl.

They stopped when they reached the clearing by the small river that fed into the town’s sewer system. Bill had made them search for his (later to be found dead) brother in the sewers a few years ago, but he hadn’t been back since, mostly because it was fucking disgusting, but also partially because of the shit that happened in there. The police had found all those bodies Bowers had stuffed in the sewers just a few weeks after they had been splashing around in there themselves, and the fact that he and his friends easily could’ve been amongst those bodies still gave him the hibbie-jibbies.

Richie closed the lighter, drenching them back into darkness. He walked further towards the bank, sitting down right before the water and crossed his legs. He pulled the joint out of his jacket pocket, putting it between his lips and lighting it, before taking a long drag and blowing out a cloud of smoke a few seconds later. He looked so in his element, Eddie thought, alone by the water taking puffs from the cigarette (or joint or whatever the fuck Eddie was supposed to call the damn thing). Eddie wondered how much he must do this, whenever their friends had plans and didn’t want to hang out with him. 

It made him sad, thinking about how lonely the boy must’ve been. He never wanted him to feel that way, not as long as he was around.

Eddie walked towards the boy and sat down next to him, watching as he took yet another hit, waited, and exhaled, smoke floating up and disperse into the night sky. Richie turned to him and held the joint out to him. Eddie raised his eyebrows at it. “How am I even supposed to do it?” he asked, looking at him skeptically.

Richie huffed out a quiet laugh and began to demonstrate. “You take it to your lips,” he said with a teasing tone, putting the blunt in his mouth. “You breath it in-” he sucked in his breath as though he was drinking something through a straw, “-and you hold it for a few seconds, like when you inhale helium from a balloon and wanna make your voice sound funny when you talk.” He says that as if Eddie’s mother would ever let him near helium balloons. “And then,” he said as he blew smoke in Eddie’s face, “you exhale, and repeat. Ready?”

Eddie still looked skeptical, but he gestured for the blunt anyways. Richie cheered as he brought it up to his lips and sucked in. There was less cheering, however, when he immediately started coughing up ll the air in his chest. 

“Jesus fuck” he said in bewteen coughs. Richie reached over and grabbed from Eddie and took yet another drag, patting Eddie on the back with his free hand. When he finally stopped coughing, Richie spoke.

“Any chance you wanna try again?”

Eddie looked at him incredulously. “No fucking way, Rich,” he scoffed. “I shouldn’t have taken a hit in the first place, I have asthma, remember?”

Now it was Richie’s turn to scoff. “That’s bullshit and we both know it, Eds.”

He huffed out a breath, half-scowling half-pouting at the other boy. He was right, the whole Loser’s Club had known that all the sick stuff his mother had shoved onto him was bullshit for a few years now, and he had stopped taking the pills as soon as he himself found out. He still insisted that he had asthma, though, mostly because he had no other term for the very real panic and loss of breath he got sometimes. Besides, the inhaler had always worked in those situations, so whether or not it was because he had asthma or because it was at this point just a coping mechanism for something else, Eddie didn’t really care.

“Well what do you propose we do instead then, huh Einstein? Since you were so adamant on making me relax.”

Richie pondered for a moment, blunt still between his lips. Suddenly, he got a very specific, very dangerous look on his face, the one he got whenever he came up with something that was always an undoubtedly awful idea. Eddie could practically see the lightbulb go off above his head, complete with a little ding sound and everything.

He turned to face Eddie completely. “Okay so I saw this in a movie once-”

“That’s promising.”

“Shut up. Anyways so this dude was smoking, right? And he’s all like mooching off this girl, right? And he was like ‘you’re so innocent, bet you haven’t even smoked before’ or something, I don’t know wasn’t really paying attention, and-”

“Richie, you saw this in a porno, didn’t you?”  
“No! You’re not listening, I’m going somewhere with this. So the chick takes the cig and takes a drag, right? But before she exhales she grabs the guy by the collar and kisses him, and then blows the smoke into his mouth like that and the guy inhales. And then the makeout and have sex or whatever, I don’t know, I got distracted by something else.”

Eddie gaped at him. “So you want us to..?”

“Kiss? Yeah, pretty much,” he said. “But we don’t have to if you don’t want to I wouldn’t wanna pressure you into something you weren’t comfortable with. I mean it would be purely just so you could get high, you know, bros helping bros, but like, whatever man.”

He winced a little at that last part. Right, because it would never be for any other reason. What did you think, Eds, that I would really wanna kiss someone like you? What do you think I am, some sort of queer?

He really shouldn’t do this, he should just suck it up and try to take hits normally, or, better yet, he should just go home. Yep, that’s what he should do, go home. Sorry Richie, but it’s really late and I can’t have you finding out about my big, fat, gay, super non-platonic crush on you. It’s been a blast!

Yes, that’s what he’ll do. He was going home and, under no circumstances, was he going to kiss Richie.

“Okay”

God fucking damnit.

Richie’s face contorted into an expression that Eddie couldn’t quite figure out. There was shock, of that he was certain, but there was something else there, something he couldn’t place. It wasn’t disgust, or at least he didn’t think it was (after all he’s never seen true disgust on Richie’s face, not when he was looking at him). Maybe it was wishful thinking, but part of him swore he could see a flash of excitement or joy cross his face, just for a second. Another part of him was certain he saw blush across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, but that was most likely just the cold, not the fact that he had basically just agreed to swap spit with him.

“O-oh, okay, I didn’t expect you to agree, uh,” Richie stuttered, fumbling the joint and almost burning himself in the process. He scooted closer to him and Eddie did the same, both boys meeting somewhere in the middle with their knees bumping together a few times. Richie took a long drag of the blunt, and Eddie took a deep breath, preparing himself. This was absolutely going to fuck up their friendship, Richie would somehow sense his gayness, or his feelings for him, and he would be so repulsed that he would never speak to him again, and then he would tell all thier friends and they would hate him, and then his mother would get wind of it and sned him off to a camp, or to a preist, or to shock therapy or some shit and he’ll be forced to marry some blodie with big tits in attempt to make him straight and he’ll have to get blowjobs from homeless men in allyways just so he could get off once in a while.

Richie’s hand came up to cradle Eddie’s jaw, while his hands stayed awkwardly in his lap. He leaned in slowly, giving Eddie plenty of time to change his mind and pull away. He didn’t. 

Finally, their lips touched, soft and light, though a bit awkwardly, clear that neither of them have really had any experience (the thought of being Richie’s first kiss made his stomach flip, more than it already was,anyways). Richie was still for a few beats, and began opening his mouth to try and exhale in Eddie’s, which was still very much sealed shut. The sensation of another boy’s lips against his seemed to jumpstart something in Eddie’s brain, opening his mouth as well, only slightly, trying to mimic his friend while still seeming as straight as possible.

This lasted about half a second, until Eddie attempted at breathing in and immediately divulged into another violent coughing fit. 

The two boys pulled away as quickly as possible, Eddie hacking up half a lung - or quite possibly the entirety of one - while Richie flew backwards in his usual dramatic fashion trying to avoid the direct blows of his coughs.

“Jesus H. Christ, Eds,” Richie exclaimed, at the same time Eddie had let out a string of fucks and shits. “Jinx.”

“That’s not how jinx works, you fucking idiot,” Eddie sputtered, finally regaining control of his breath as he expelled the last molecule of smoke from his lungs.

The next minute was spent in relative silence, broken only by Eddie clearing his throat, hocking up a tiny bit of phleb and spitting it out onto the ground next to him. So much for first kisses, he thought.

He didn’t even get enough time to properly enjoy it. It was most likely going to be the only time he’d ever get to kiss a man, and certainly the only time he’d ever get to kiss Richie, and all he got to show for it was a black spot in his lung where the smoke had given him cancer. Okay, logically he knew that was false, cancer didn’t form that quickly, and even if it did, it took more than just a few small hits of pot to give it to you, but it might as well have been true. At the very least, it would’ve given him a reason not to want to do it again.

(He ignored the large part of his brain that told him that if he did get cancer he would deserve it.)

“So…” Richie began, clearing his throat and breaking the silence. When he spoke his voice was soft, a stark contrast to the usual brash loudness Eddie was used to. “You wanna try that again?”

Alarm bells went off in Eddie’s brain. What does “that” mean? Does he mean the weed or the-

“No, Rich, what the fuck?!” He exclaimed, looking at the other teen incredulously, trying not to sound too alarmed at the idea of Richie possibly maybe suggesting locking lips with him again.

Richie looked taken aback, almost hurt. It was surprising, Eddie didn’t think he’s ever seen Richie look like that before. “Yeah! Yeah, no, of course,” Richie siad, clearing his throat once more, looking away and lifting his hand to scratch the back of his neck awkwardly. “We wouldn’t want you to come down with a case of TB, right Spaghetti?”

Richie tried his best to seem nonchalant, and joking again, like he was at the beginning of the night, but something still lingered behind his eyes, a mix of sorrow and something else Eddie couldn’t quite place.

He chose to ignore it.

“Tuberculosis isn’t caused by smoking, dumbass.”

Richie grinned slightly. “Says you,” he replied.

“Says doctors.”

They slowly packed themselves up, bickering about whether or not tuberculosis was caused by bacteria, like medical professionals said it was, or by smoking grass. They walked alone through the barrens and, eventually, the dark streets of Derry, Richie refusing to stick to the sidewalks, instead choosing to wander in the empty roads, freaking Eddie out in the process (“Richie, you’re gonna get run over. I swear to god, if you get run over and get your guts all over me I’ll kill you and I won’t come to the funeral, I am dead-fucking serious, Richie-”).

They reached Eddie’s window and climbed up to it, Richie staying behind in the tree while Eddie climbed through into the middle of the small bedroom. He looked back to Richie and raised his eyebrow in a silent question, asking if he was gonna stay longer. Richie shook his head. By now it was nearing sunrise, the sky lightening at the horizon, meaning that Richie’s siblings and, by extension, his parents would be awake soon. It was Christmas Day, after all, there were activities to attend to. 

Eddie smiled at him. Pretty soon he’d be in church with his mother, feeling awful about what had happened earlier that morning, wishing to forget his feelings and just be normal, but for now, he was content in staring at the boy in his window, just as he did nearly every day since that summer in middle school. 

He sighed lightly and walked closer to the window, Richie still perched in the tree just outside the window, waiting to be excused to rush back to his own house until the time came to pretend to be jostled awake by his younger siblings. Eddie leaned in close to the boy’s face, almost as close as they were in the barrens. He stared at the boy’s lips, wishing desperately to have the courage to surge forward and connect their lips again. He looked back up to meet Richie’s eyes, looking at his own like they belonged to the man who hung all the stars and planets in the night sky. “Night, Richie,” he whispered.

Richie exhaled through his nose and closed his eyes, dropping his head to knock against Eddie’s own and nodding. He turned to start climbing down to the ground, not looking back to respond.

He stood at the trunk of the tree for a few seconds, shoulders heavy and still looking down. He reached into his pockets and pulled out something that Eddie couldn’t see from the second story window. Richie pulled what Eddie could only assume was a cigarette from the object and lit it, putting the object back in his back pocket and took a drag, looking out at the deserted streets in front of him. 

Not turning back to face him, Richie shouted and bid him farewell.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you sm for reading ! feel free to leave kudos/a comment if you enjoyed it :)
> 
> also feel free to follow me on twitter @wthoutoxygen


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